The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Usby Bee Wilson 308pp, John Murray, £14.99

At the opening of this book, Bee Wilson paints a picture of the era before our remote ancestors discovered how to steal wild honey. "Imagine," she writes,"a world in which the lights went off until daybreak as soon as the sun went down; a world in which... you could never taste anything sweeter than a piece of fruit; a world in which there was no satisfactory way of getting drunk."

Was there truly no candlelight before beeswax? Aren't dates quite a bit sweeter than honey? Were there no other fermented drinks but mead? Still, as an invitation to read a monograph on honey and honeybees, Wilson's opening can hardly be bettered.

Bee Wilson is a real name. It is not an occupational nickname, like Corsica Boswell or Dictionary Johnson. Principally a writer on food, Wilson none the less knows a lot about keeping honeybees, and also about their biology and natural history, waxworks and candles, and the changing shape of the beehive. What most interests her is the bee colony as a sort of image or counterpart of human society. Since antiquity, men and women have imposed on the hive all sorts of beliefs about their own civil government, relations between the sexes and domestic and political economy. For those used only to the drone of beekeepers, the book is welcome.

Honeybees were hived - one cannot say domesticated - at least four to five thousand years BC, in Egypt. In The Iliad, Achilles puts two jars of honey beside Patroclus's funeral pyre. Odysseus pours out honey mixed with milk to summon the dead in The Odyssey. The Romans loved honey and produced, in Virgil's Fourth Georgic, the literary masterpiece of beekeeping. It combines advice on siting hives with instructions on how to generate bees from the putrid corpses of oxen. In Britain, honey's heyday was the 12th century AD, Wilson says, when the population consumed about two kilograms of the liquid per person per year.

The Reformation destroyed the monastic apiaries and dissipated their expertise, while cane sugar - first from the Arab world and then the Americas - proved more suited to a new and lighter style of cooking. As Robert Southerne, an Elizabethan beekeeper, complained, honey was too "fulsome" for the modern taste. In the middle of the 19th century, there was a revolution in beekeeping when an American, Lorenzo Langstroth, devised the movable-frame hive. Beekeepers no longer needed to destroy the colony for its honey. Though beekeeping has become much easier, honey is still relatively neglected. The British now eat just half a jar of honey each a year, while downing their weight (53kg) in refined sugar.

On looking into the hive, the ancients were fascinated by the geometry of the comb, by the hierarchy and organisation of the bees, by the precise division of tasks, and by the absence of any sexual activity. As Virgil wrote, bees do not have sex ( neque concubitu indulgent ). Such chastity commended them to the early church and monastic beekeepers. For moralists, it was all the better that the hive contained not merely these industrious paragons but their moral opposite, "the lazy yawning drone" of Henry V, Act 1.

To the medieval eye, the hive revealed a world of fixed occupations, patriarchal power and absolute government. In the 17th century, Charles Butler in England and Jan Schwammerdam in the Netherlands confirmed the growing suspicion that the "king" of the colony was actually a queen, but it was not until the 18th century, the great era of female emancipation, that the hive was finally accepted as an "Amazonian or feminine kingdom". When the Slovenian Anton Janscha and the Swiss François Huber and François Burnens established that the queen mated with several drones on a so-called mating flight, the old-line moralists were put to flight. The queen was no better than she should be, "a base, notorious impudent strumpet, with gallants by the hundreds", in the words of a clergyman-beekeeper, John Thorley.

Meanwhile, a Dutch doctor living in London, Bernard de Mandeville, introduced into his allegorical hive the fashionable new ideology of self-interest. In The Fable of the Bees, first printed in 1714 and much worked over, some deluded bees resolve to act according to virtue, with disastrous consequences for their industry and their colony. The Fable bothered Adam Smith all his life and both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations were attempts at a response. Nowadays, the bee hive is as likely to be seen as a Stakhanovite dystopia.

Schwammerdam was so haunted by the perfection of the bees that, in the words of the great medical doctor Hermann Boerhaave, he had to remind himself "that God alone, and not these creatures, was worthy of his researches, love and attention". Here we see the modern mind at the point of formation. Virgil's aërii mellis celestia dona, Dryden's "air-born honey, gift of heaven", falls to earth, like the mating queen and drone that fell at the feet of the Revd Millette of Pennsylvania in 1859 and at last solved the conundrum of honeybee reproduction. For Wilson, honey is so miraculous it might even have been made by man: "Honeycomb is one of those natural phenomena so marvellous it is hard for us to believe they weren't made by human hands."

Wilson doesn't keep bees and so doesn't talk about the economics of beekeeping. The modern honeybee possesses the miraculous ability to get under your veil and sting you on the lip. Stings act as what students of commerce call a "barrier to entry". The result is that there isn't enough honey to go round and, if you can persuade your bees to part with their honey, you can sell it at a profit. Tending your Langstroth hives will take about an hour a week but only in summer. As an agricultural activity, beekeeping sure beats cutting sugar canes or lifting beets.

Finally, does the queen really, just before a colony swarms, as Wilson claims, "make a shrill, piping cry, louder than any other sound emanating from the hive"? We may now know that bees returning to the hive perform a dance to map out where the best nectar is to be found, but we know scarcely more about honeybees than Virgil.